Computing, archiving, digital media, and a bit of historical speculation

Saturday, 23 May 2009

blogs and long term archiving

This blog, like a lot of other blogs (I was going to say of note, but that's a little presumptuous) is hosted for free.

Free hosting of course means there is no obligation on the provider to keep hosting as in the case of yahoo and geocities.

Well I used to have a blog on journalspace. I don't any more - it's gone, and JournalSpace looks now to be a wordpress based hosting site using wordpress-mu just as we do.

Whether it's gone bust, been taken over in GFC I don't know.

Anyway it's gone, along with two years or so of my posts and notes. (Which to be fair I referred to rarely, which is why I didn't notice its demise).

Fortunately I do have backups of most of the content so I'm not stuffed. But is does beg the question with so much discourse, scholarly or not, making use of hosted services, what happens when a service dies?

1 comment:

the actual story is a lot worse. Lack of a proper backup system meant that when the system crashed, everything went. So we come back to whole question of the curation of data entrusted to free services

About Me

Been an IT professional, a field ecologist and tried my hand at research in psychology. Now retired, I'm a blogger, twitterer, traveller, pontificator and classical and early medieval history geek - I'm also known to enjoy a decent pinot noir, and late night conversations about central Asia, the Russian Revolution and just about anything else.
Some claim I know too much about some things, some that I know too little.